Lionel left a big impression.

I’ll post other bits of evidence of this, but it goes a long way towards making the point, to post this. A two page spread published in one of Toronto’s major weekly papers, three months after his death.

It’s an impressive hagiography, if not a little bit biased. Like most things in the media it’s not exactly a accurate picture, but rather one reporters impression of him.

This appeared in Street Talk – a Thursday insert in the Toronto Star – September 27, 1979.

I saw this a few months after his funeral, it’s exemplary of the mythical man I grew up with after his death, so for a comic memoir I did later I recreated it by hand. Here’s both version.

One of the things about it that I remeber reading this as a kid, and suck in my mind even more amusingly – What, i was 8! – was the story on the next page about toys…